Tag Archives: what’s wrong with education

Hat tip to John Oliver for his epic takedown of high stakes standardized testing. It’s taken the airwaves by storm.

“Something is wrong with our system when we just assume a certain number of kids will vomit,” ‘Last Week Tonight’ host John Oliver says.

“Let’s put the tests to the test”

This is the most in depth and genuinely informed coverage of high stakes testing outside of the pro-public ed circles, to date. Since it aired on Sunday night, it has been viewed more than 1.5 million times in just over 24 hours.

John Oliver was the perfect celebrity/media gun to take on high stakes standardized testing. Why? He has an uncanny ability to take a topic of national significance with an enormous amount of information and many different moving parts and distill it down to its most essential elements and convey it simply. Satire at its best.

Considering the 200,000 opt outs in New York, plus all the activists in the states with major opt out activity – CA, CO, FL, NJ, OK, WA, and TX – John Oliver’s message has now reached hundreds of thousands of parents and educators who have not previously even been aware of the opt out movement. This is a huge boost to the opt out movement.

Here are just some of the articles that have been written about Oliver’s video in the first 24 hours.